John Blaze says Hot 103 Jamz fired him under pressure from the Power & Light District

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“Let Me In,” a song off Kansas City rapper Tech N9ne’s 2009 album, Sickology 101, opens with an audio skit. A bouncer with an exaggerated redneck voice is letting patrons into a club.

“Party night tonight! Come on in. You’re good, Skinny Jeans, come on in. Tight Shirt, come on in. Ahh, that new rock-and-roll gay look, yeah, you’re cool, come on in.”

Tech arrives at the entrance.

“You can’t get in here, boy.”

“What’s wrong with me, man?”

“Can’t you read the sign, boy?”

Tech reads it aloud: “No French braids, no dreadlocks, no gold teeth. Oh, you don’t want no black folks in here, huh?”

The bouncer says, “Can’t you read the sign? It says, ‘Power and White, I mean Power & Light District …'”

Cordish, the Baltimore-based owner and operator of the Power & Light District, has long been dogged by accusations of racial discrimination in Kansas City. Around the time that Tech released “Let Me In,” the company was in hot water for enforcing a dress code that seemed to target African-Americans. (It modified the code, following a discrimination complaint from the city.) More recently, Cordish has been accused of hiring “rabbits”: white men who deliberately pick fights with black patrons, giving security the excuse to eject those customers. A federal judge dismissed a rabbit-related lawsuit earlier this year; a separate suit filed in Jackson County is set for trial in November.

Last month, Tech N9ne played the Power & Light District’s KC Live stage for the first time. Backstage before the September 13 show, Tech gave an interview to KCTV Channel 5 in which he alluded to the district’s rocky history of race relations.

John Blaze, a DJ at KPRS 103.3 (Hot 103 Jamz) and one of the masters of ceremony for the P&L show, overheard the interview. Later, from the stage, hyping up the sold-out crowd, Blaze said: “This is Tech N9ne’s very first show at KC Live! I even heard him say this backstage on the news, that there was one point in time that he may not have ever been allowed to be received here at Power & Light. So what I want you to do, what I need you to do, one time, is put your middle fingers up. Anybody that’s ever been turned away, anybody who has ever been discriminated against. I need you to say, ‘Fuck you!’ one time. On three: one, two, three, ‘Fuck you!'”

The crowd loved it. The suits backstage, not so much.

Blaze tells The Pitch that he meant only to rouse Tech’s audience into a frenzy of solidarity, and he notes that the “fuck you” was addressed to anybody who discriminates, not specifically P&L. And, Blaze says, he was only repeating what Tech had already said to a TV station. But Power & Light representatives at the show interpreted his words as a direct attack.

“At first, they thought somebody from Strange [Strange Music, Tech’s label] was behind it, so they were heated at Travis [O’Guin, Strange Music’s CEO],” Blaze says. “Then a Power & Light guy comes up to me after I got offstage and says he wants to speak to my management on-site. They talk, then my management at Hot 103 — Rich McCauley, the promotions director, and Myron Fears, the program director — start cursing me out, saying, ‘What the fuck did you do? We’re trying to build a relationship with Power & Light and you ruined it.’ All this stuff. Rich is making like he’s going to physically come after me. Then it cooled down, and I left.” (Representatives for the Power & Light District did not respond to The Pitch‘s requests for comment.)

The next day, Blaze was told not to report for his 5 a.m. shift on the air. Two days later, Blaze was fired by Carter Broadcasting Group, owner of 103.3 and gospel sister station KPRT 1590. He says he had no previous marks against him with Carter.

“They told me they had to protect their brand,” Blaze says.

Worth noting: Two DJs at KRBZ 96.5 (the Buzz) cost their parent company, Entercom Kansas City, $1 million last fall in a lawsuit. A federal court ruled that Afentra Bandokoudis and Daniel Terreros, who broadcast as Afentra and Danny Boi, had defamed a woman by incorrectly calling her a porn star. They kept their jobs.

Carter Broadcasting rose up alongside the civil rights movement. In 1950, when it began broadcasting on the AM frequency 1590, it was the first black-owned radio station west of the Mississippi. It’s also the oldest African-American family-owned radio station in the United States. Roughly 70 percent of its listeners are black, according to recent media audits.

But these are hard times for legacy media. “Everybody who works there knows there are monetary issues with the station, and every dollar counts,” says Blaze, who had been with 103.3 since September 2013. “That’s the way it is in pretty much all radio anymore. But for seven years, Power & Light had never invited Hot 103 to host a show or sponsor anything. Then they finally did, with this Tech show. They wanted that relationship with Power & Light so bad, even given the history of the station, with the civil rights movement and all that. Even though many of their listeners, who are mostly black, have a problem with the way Power & Light has operated in the past.”

Freddie Bell, longtime union steward for Carter Broadcasting and an on-air personality for Gospel 1590, started at the station in 1976. He retired a week before the Tech show at Power & Light. He agrees with Blaze’s assessment. “It had always been a contentious situation with them [P&L],” Bell says. “We’d been trying to get a presence at Power & Light for a long time, but they’d shy away from us, I think, because we’re associated with hip-hop and rap.”

Bell adds that he once criticized local clothing retailer Harold Pener on the air for supporting only the secular side of the station (103.3), as opposed to the gospel side. “At the time, he was one of our biggest advertisers,” Bell says. “They threatened to fire me. Then I had to spend the next two weeks talking about what a great guy Harold Pener was.”

Representatives from Carter Broadcasting did not respond to requests for comment.

UPDATE: Nick Benjamin of Cordish says: “The Tech N9ne show was a great show that brought thousands of people to the District and raised $10,000 for an extremely important charity, Operation Breakthrough. We were extremely excited to have Tech N9ne, one of Kansas City’s great home grown talents, play the KC Live stage and we hope to have him back frequently. We have a great relationship with Carter Broadcasting and look forward to partnering with them on additional events. Any employment decision made by Carter Broadcasting subsequent to the show was made completely independently of us and we had absolutely no involvement in it whatsoever.”

As for Tech? His publicist, Richie Abbott, tells The Pitch: “We’d actually rather not get involved here.”